still and always so good-looking (as is his wife, my baby sister), so talented, an excellent father and husband, a man who deserves, after a long career as a high school art teacher, to retire this year, which he will (and my sister, the amazing physical therapist, will, too).
Honestly, when did the man rack up six-and-a-half decades? I’m six months behind him, age-wise, and I can’t feature either of us old enough to retire or him old enough to be a grandpa, which he’s set to become in June as his daughter (my niece, born on my 29th birthday) marinates a new life inside her.
But there you are—just yesterday, I swear, we played in the college band together, and then he and my sister, both of them in gleaming white, got married, and, it seemed, a minute after that one baby, then a second, arrived, as he house-husbanded the family,
then a whole career, a whole life, far from over—still exuberantly, joyfully in progress—with bike riding and painting and gardening and more to be discovered.
So happy birthday, dear Eric, sketching a future into 65, and beyond (to infinity, perhaps) with so much love from so many who adore you—not least me.
One still on the planet, one not— Parton and Joplin, two music icons whose songs so many of us can sing from memory—
though for two fine singers born on the same day, you couldn’t get such different musical styles.
And how is it that Janis was born three years before Dolly? Each seems ageless, larger than life—or death— frozen in photos as young women singing their hearts out:
—Take another little piece of my heart now, baby —I will always love you —Oh, Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz —Pour myself a cup of ambition —Try, try, try just a little bit harder
And you just know that one day when Dolly takes to that great stage in the hereafter, she’ll find Janis, and they’ll sing up a ruckus so loud we’ll hear ’em all the way down here—
…all I really know is here you come again, and here I go…
Birthday twins born Jan. 19—Dolly Parton (1946) and Janis Joplin (1943)
You can’t stay in your corner of the forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes. —Winnie the Pooh (by A.A. Milne, born Jan. 18, 1882)
So let’s lace up our big boots and step out into the world where the rain has stopped
for a bit, and the little clouds float in the blue as the winter sky shimmers with radiance
that comes with a freshly washed world, perfect for a walk, perhaps a visitation
to someone who might like a friend to stop by, someone who, like Piglet, with his very
small heart, might find in it a rather large amount of gratitude that you,
big, old bear, came to sit and talk awhile, because, after all, it’s so much more
I let my poet off her leash, and, unclipped, she turned her furry head and shot me a question—
Really?
Yes, I said. Go ahead. Run wherever your heart directs you. Sniff what catches your fancy. Gobble up luscious lines. Lie in greening couplets and rest when you like. Chase what verbs need chasing.
Nose twitching, she licked possibility, tasting syllables, inhaling stanzas, and, in a blur of metaphor, I threw the leash away,
Joy is the whole cookie, fat with chocolate chips or smooth as shortbread. In fact, the more crumbs you mash onto a finger and apply to your tongue, the sweeter the joy.
No one tells you this; it’s something you must learn yourself. But this is why we fall into doughy goodness, mad for the cookies that call to us:
snickerdoodles, gingersnaps, biscotti and peanut butter, oatmeal (with or without raisins), those with gluten or without, macadamia nut, molasses, macaroon, the thumbprints with their divine jelly wells, holiday spritz, the snowball, lebkuchen, the gingerbread—
all cookies cut out or dropped, made of thousands of crumbs of delight mixed with love, baked into pure bliss.
Gleefully gobble those morsels—don’t miss a one. Let all that joy dribble onto your grinning face.
The universe keeps dying and being reborn, physicists say. It doesn’t stay the same; it’s ever expanding, as Einstein theorized— exponential expansion, which means that as much as we want things to remain the same, a rock solid cosmological constant, they just aren’t.
In the universe of your heart, the seemingly dead was jumpstarted back to life. Weighted with such inexplicable mass, I had to sit and breathe for a bit, as did you, recovering.
Now, four years later, I remind myself that we are continually reborn, the cosmos within each of us exponentially expanding at times, contracting at others. Our meager concept of time turns out to be a mere eyeblink—
proving again that love is the true cosmological constant, like atoms ping-ponging across the cosmos, traveling through space to lodge squarely in our fragile, starstruck hearts.
In between storms I take my walk to find, not far inside the open iron gate, the first uprooted tree, its underside typically hidden underground, the lacy petticoat and fine bones unearthed, nakedly exposed under a hazy blue sky
Another of the fallen, its green apron of grass still attached, has been sheared open, exposing its heart to the sun, surrounded by rings I’m tempted to count, wondering how long it stood here. A thousand lost, say the estimates, in this city known for its trees.
And with them here lie the markers of those gone long before these giants fell on this memorial field, their limbs strewn on muddy grass, the normally tidy in disarray,
the new dead upended with the old dead, some with their stones dislodged—
Justine L. Coffey, waiting for the Lord, next to Charles E. Coffey, WWI Aero Squadron, Julius Nyberg, beloved husband, Angeline Marie Glans, in loving memory—
side by side as it has always been, as we among the living walk through and remember.
You never Zoomed a poetry reading, I’m sure, certainly not of the journal you founded forty years before anyone imagined speaking at a computer screen. You held proper readings at the Jones Library or the Munson, requiring in-person attendance of readers and listeners.
They were Events, painstakingly planned, with a typed Reading Order and Refreshments that you provided, likely a Podium and Microphone. You—MC, introducer, cheerleader, hugger—as each reader came up, often nervous, with you there afterward, whispering, “Wonderful!”
Tonight we held our second virtual reading for the 36th edition of Peregrine, Zooming with a terrific batch of onscreen readers from all over—among them Kate in Wales, Bonnie in Portland, and Ralph whose poem reflected his childhood in Brooklyn—along with a generous audience of listeners.
I imagined you among them, too, though your face did not appear in a box on my screen, though you vanished into mystery more than two years ago.
I cannot say your name as I sing your praises during the introduction— as I did each time you came to speak and lead workshops in my town— without sensing your steady presence as I metaphorically step to the virtual microphone, read what I have written, only to step away and hear you in my ear:
“Wonderful, honey. Nicely done.”
(Special thanks to all the folks published in Peregrine, the Amherst Writers & Artists journal, especially those who read at our two virtual readings, to Danielle McKinney, our MC, and to Sue Reynolds, whose fine leadership and sweet praise will stay with me. And, of course, to AWA founder Pat Schneider, whose work we carry on with great love and much enthusiasm.)
Güd wrtr 